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1sockchuck writes "One of year's most tantalizing technology secrets involves Apple's $1 billion investment in a new data center in North Carolina. Is it the Death Star in Apple's plan for galactic domination? Some Apple watchers predict it will be the hub for a 21st century broadcasting network. Other enthusiasts are doing flyovers to film videos of the 500,000 square foot facility. There's also an unofficial FAQ about the new data center. What is Apple up to with this huge facility?"

I know it's always tempting (and easy) to fire off a quick anti-Apple slam, but...Jesus Christ on a crutch...couldn't you take a minute to learn the source of the video? It took me 10 seconds to find out that it was made by a local real estate agent. Somebody who quite probably has a financial interest in learning more about a billion-dollar Apple data center being built in his town. Hardly an "Apple fanboi."

You misunderstand. I'm not asking why you'd want to go with services other than Apple's.Mac. I'm asking why you'd want to go with services that pretend to be.Mac instead of just using regular, off the shelf services for mail, jabber, backup disk, etc.

What?

For instance the remote desktop thingy

You mean Apple Remote Desktop? That doesn't rely upon the.Mac service that I know of. It's just a remote desktop client that runs on OS X (usually server).

Other examples would be Timemachine backups to whatever wireless router with an NTFS/FAT32 USB HDD.

That's not a function of.Mac either, it's just a limitation of the OS X built in backup (limited support for filesystems). The method used relies upon the journaling in HFS+ and they haven't spent the time to make it work with any other journaled filesystems, lt alone non-journaled ones. But this all has nothing to do with Apple's.Mac services.

Has nothing to do with MobileMe...

Right, so you still haven't pointed out anything you can do with.Mac or MobileMe or whatever that you can't replicate with other services.

...but still with inconvenient solutions from Apple just so they can sell more of their gear.

It's actually a real limitation based upon filesystems. You can use any wireless router plugged into an HFS+ hard drive.

I'd rather choose options which benefits _me_.

By all means you should choose what works for you, but I'm not seeing how Apple is making that intentionally difficult other than not going out of their way to port some of their software to other OS's and filesystems.

- Apple says that its “data center environment consists of MacOS X, IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems.”
- The Maiden facility will have a “heavy emphasis” on high availability technologies, including IBM’s HACMP and HAGEO solutions for high-availability clusters, Veritas Cluster Server, and Oracle’s DataGuard and Real Application Clusters.
- Job candidates are also asked to be familiar with storage systems using IBM, NetApp and Data Domain, and data warehousing systems from Teradata.
- Networking positions require a familiarity with Brocade and Qlogic switches.